Now more than ever. The phrase is everywhere, its most famous use (“Now more than ever seems it rich to die,” from “Ode to a Nightingale”) blithely forgotten. Forgotten, too, is Nixon’s campaign slogan from 1972. He was funneling money from the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) to burglars, who were bugging offices, faking correspondence, wrecking the Democratic primaries, and rigging the election. The Justice Department, FBI, the CIA (the “Deep State”!) — everyone was involved. How much did we need it? “Our environment, our cities, our economy, our dealings with other nations — there is much to be done, to be changed,” warned the smoke-ragged white-man voice in his political ad. “That is why we need President Nixon, now more than ever.”
Sweaty, dirty, grizzled Nixon: now there was another President who got in people’s heads every day. But he saved his best, sickest material for the tapes. With Trump, there’s no smoking gun to subpoena. He gets there first, spraying you in the face with a buckshot shell of tweets.
To perceive “now” as being “more than ever,” one has to be in a period of crisis and disjuncture — or at least feel like one is. And “now more than ever” has always been used to sell things in moments of crisis. Like ASAP, it’s an efficiently grandiose way to convey a false sense of urgency.
Google Ngram shows pervasive use of the phrase in the 19th century—mostly, it seems, in missionary tracts, where it conveyed evangelical fervor. It fell out of favor in the early 20th century, then spiked again during the world wars. “During the war,” the Economist wrote in 1949, “advertisers, in an effort to sell goods totally unrelated to the seriousness of the time, found the value of sentences beginning ‘Now more than ever . . . ,’ which helped them to sell tennis racquets and bathing suits with the argument that keeping fit was now more than ever vital.” “Now more than ever” went through a steady decline over the course of the postwar era, despite the Nixon plug, as the cold war resolved in favor of capitalism.
But during this apparent decline, the production of nowness grew more pervasive and sophisticated. Radio broadcasts and evening editions gave way to twenty-four-hour TV news and the infinite scroll of social media feeds. To keep up, we made ourselves constantly but abstractedly alert, ready for moments of outrage or disappointment, because there would always be a reason, now more than ever, to feel them. It was how the world made money, too. Producing the feeling of “now more than ever” could get you clicks, views, ratings.